chocolate layer cake.

ok LOONG absence but school's been putting me down SERIOUSLY.
i baked alex a chocolate cake for his birthday just 2 days ago, hence donating about 3.5hours of my life devoting myself to mixing, baking and washing up just so he could get this chocolate cake.

its not too much, just a layered cake with chocolate pastry cream but i was really pleased with it. i fancy it's because the chocolate cake's not too sweet or cloying: the sponge layer was quite nice and airy and provided a nice contrast to the richer pastry cream. i've made this pastry cream twice now, and i have to say i loved it. it's easy to work with and just about tastes fantastic out of the bowl. not that i would know too much about that though.

ok i cant lie. you have to taste the filling before you put it in the cake! im keeping that as my excuse. just a couple of pictures, although i forgot to take one of the inside :(
here's the sponge cake i made for the layers. was a bit worried because the cake kept sinking as it cooled, and the sides weren't straight, but sunk a little in the middle. when i tried to cut it so it was perfectly square and levelled the top of the cake, it seemed a little dry but lightly cocoa-flavored which i liked so that almost convinced me to make a sugar syrup for the layers. i didnt have time to do that though.

so what i did was i layered the pastry cream between the layer. 2 layers of pastry cream between 3 sponge layers, clingwrapped the whole thing and refrigerated it, thinking that the moist pastry cream would help to tie everything together. the next morning, i took the cake out and iced it with the pastry cream (really ought to have made a ganache of some sort so it'd be shiny and pretty, but i had remaining cream and the cream did taste nice so i thought wth let's just do it.)

here's the finished product:the plate's a little messy but this was done before class and i really couldnt do much about being neat. the top are just chocolate slabs that i made and cut up into triangles to do a sort of decoration about it. i thought it was pretty, and alex and i thought the chocolate tasted good, so there.

here's a picture of the chocolate slabs setting on my kitchentop:just some marbled white and dark chocolate. but it was oh-so-satisfying cutting it up into squares and triangles :D

alex liked the cake, enough that he had 2 slices just before we were due to go for lunch so i guess that's good enough.